19/04/2018 : "Does employability matter the same for different countries and occupational groups? An overview of recent studies and a suggested avenue for future research"parAlessandro Lo Presti (Dipartimento di Psichologica, Universita degli studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"; Employability and career development: AIP Research Team WORK IN PROGRESS for a better quality of life (http://www.aipass.org/node/6938)Abstract: Traditional labour markets that used to guide careers and career paths have become increasingly blurred and permeable (Parker, 2002). Scholars have witnessed a shift from traditional career ladders, loyalty in exchange of job security and increasing duties and responsibilities, to boundaryless careers (Jones & DeFillippi, 1996), flat and project-based organizations (Bredin & Soderlund, 2013). In light of these changes, individuals need to be more self-reliant and to be in charge of their own career development, said differently to be employable both within their current organizations and across different potential employers (Hall, 2002).

Although, some scholars stated that the term employability is a term more often used than properly understood (Philphott, 1998), the recent years have witnessed a sharp increase in studies about such concept. A basic and fundamental distinction is between perceived employability, meant as the perceived likelihood of finding adequate alternative employment (Rothwell & Arnold, 2007) and a plethora of other definitions that stressed the role of attitudes, dispositions and behaviors in increasing the chances of future employment (Fugate, Kinicki & Ashforth, 2004; van der Heijde & van der Heijden, 2006). Apart from theoretical considerations, lack of studies about peculiar populations (e.g., freelancers), carried out in Italy, and cross-cultural comparisons, together call for additional studies.

Based on Van Dam’s (2004) distinction about employability orientation and activities, the aim of the first part of my presentation is to discuss the evidence of a set of studies that examined:

a) the mediating role of professional commitment and employability orientation in the relationship between protean and boundaryless career attitudes and subjective career success among a sample of Italian freelancers;

b) the moderating role of employability culture and the presence of clear paths in the relationships between protean and boundaryless career attitudes, employability and both subjective and objective career success among a sample of Italian project managers;

c) a cross-cultural comparison of the mediating role of employability orientation in the relationship between self-esteem and well-being at work among two samples of Italian and Finnish employees;

d) the mediating role of employability activities in the relationship between knowing-why career competencies, academic satisfaction, and both subjective and objective career success among a sample of recent Italian graduates.

Based on current theoretical weaknesses and controversies, the aim of the second, and shorter, part of my presentation is to discuss a recent framework for the study of employability (Lo Presti & Pluviano. 2016) encompassing both a configurational and a causal model, and presenting some preliminary evidence.

Implications for vocational guidance, work psychology and human resource management will be proposed and discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Hall, D.T. (2002). Careers In and Out of Organizations. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks.

Jones, C., DeFillippi, R.J. (1996). Back to the future in film: combining industry and self-knowledge to meet the career challenges of the 21st century. The Academy of Management Executive 10(4), 89–103.

Parker, P. (2002). Working with the intelligent career model. Journal of Employment Counseling 39, 83–96.

Lo Presti, A. and Pluviano, S. (2016). Looking for a route in turbulent waters: Employability as a compass for career success. Organizational Psychology Review. 6(2). 192–211.

Recently, there has been an increase in interest of the application of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) in work and organizational psychology, with scholars (i.e. Harms, 2011; Paetzold, 2015; Richards and Schat, 2011; Scrima et al., 2015) that have highlighted the role that attachment styles may play in describing and interpreting phenomena in the work environment. Conversely, although the relationship between attachment theory and place attachment (a key concept in environmental psychology; for a review, see Scannell and Gifford, 2010) have long been explored in the literature, and the attachment theory has widely utilized in the formulation of theories concerning affective bonds that individuals develop with their physical environment (Giuliani, 2003). I believe that applying attachment theory to place attachment could provide important information for the development of human resource (HR) management (Hom et al., 2012). These practices, already proven effective to modify attachment styles among colleagues (Harms, 2011), may apply to change the workplace attachment styles. Therefore, the aim of this presentation is to extend this field of research by showing that attachment styles can provide a better understanding of the process of workplace attachment

28 septembre 2017 - "Some Further Clarifications on Changes in Stroop Interference across Life Span"

Maria Augustinova (CRFDP, Université de Rouen Normandie)

Résumé

"Since its conception, the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) continuously provides a fertile ground for a study of human cognition. Yet, the processes underlying interference that is observed in this task are still subject to a considerable scientific debate. In this talk I will present several experimental studies that attempted to address these still open issues directly instead of inferring them from changes in overall (i.e., standard) Stroop interference. To this end, different age groups were administered the semantic Stroop paradigm that successfully captures the contribution of distinct components of Stroop interference (e.g., Augustinova & Ferrand, 2014; Augustinova et al., 2017).

The results of these studies show that a) Stroop interference is indeed a composite phenomenon involving both automatic and controlled processes and therefore b) these distinct types of processes (hence magnitudes of distinct components of Stroop interference) evolve differently across lifespan. The somewhat obvious conclusion of this talk is that these processes are more successfully integrated within multi-stage accounts of Stroop interference than within the historically favored single-stage response competition accounts that still dominate current psychological research and practice."

Apraxia in general and tool use disorders in particular may reduce autonomy in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. However, very few studies have been done in this field, and they rarely take specificities of dementia into account (e.g., evolution, focal or diffuse atrophy, different phenotypes). A reason for this is that there is no theoretical consensus on the nature of apraxia.

Noticeably, two theories of apraxia can be distinguished: Memory-based hypotheses and reasoning-based or dynamic hypotheses. According to the memory-based approach, apraxia is due to a loss of stored knowledge (e.g., semantic memory, gesture engrams). In contrast, the dynamic approach posits that gesture production is made possible by online cognitive mechanisms (e.g., technical reasoning, affordances, sensory integration). In this framework, apraxic disorders have been explained by various cognitive impairments, some of which are not praxis-specific (e.g., semantic memory, planning skills, body schema, working memory, etc.).

The aim of the present work was to assess the relative contribution of these different cognitive mechanisms to apraxia in patients with different neurodegenerative diseases (i.e., Alzheimer’s disease, semantic dementia, corticobasal degeneration, posterior cortical atrophy).

The following issues will be addressed during this presentation, each corresponding to a different study and methodology: 1) The relative roles of technical reasoning and semantic memory in tool use; 2) The relative roles of motor and planning skills in tool use; 3) The relative roles of semantic memory and personal habits in object categorization; 4) Different patterns of impairment of sensory integration and body knowledge.

Alzheimer Dementia (AD) is linked to a neuronal degeneration that is to date still uncurable despite huge research progress. Moreover, the psychological support offered to patients and their family during the period between the diagnosis and the institutionalization is scarce compared to the financial issues raised by their life quality decline during this period. This decline is linked to a progressive social withdrawal that follows the installation of cognitive and behavioral impairments.

The goal of this project is (i) to evidence preserved mechanisms necessary to successful communication in patients with AD at the first stages of the disease and (ii) to start investigating how to rely on these preserved processes in order to improve the quality of the patient’s social exchanges while reducing their withdrawal and cognitive decline. Interpersonal interactions heavily rely on the decoding of non-verbal cues that constitutes a basic process for social adaptation. Among others, we will focus on three particular non-verbal cues: emotional prosody, eye contact and odors/fragrances.

Concerning emotional prosody and eye contact, the literature suggests that the processing of these cues could be preserved in patients with early AD and be used to improve the quality of both their social exchange, and their cognitive abilities during social interactions. Concerning odor perception, it is well known that olfactory performances during explicit tasks are impaired very early in AD. However, since odors are emotional cues that could implicitly influence the perception of others and emotional autobiographical memory - that is preserved in AD - we assume that they could be used to create an hedonic context so as to improve social interactions too.

As a first step, we have investigated the preservation of the implicit processing of emotional prosody, eye contact and odors perception in AD patients. Secondly, we have explored the impact of these social non-verbal cues on other cognitive functions such as (i) memory, (ii) attentional processing and (iii) self-consciousness.